Teachers? perceptions about practicability of total quality management principals at high schools

Even though Total Quality Management was first developed mainly for the industry and business sectors, its impact has been wide spread to other institutions as well. One of these institutions is schools today. Instead of redeveloping TQM in education sectors, we only need to employ its principles as required by us. What is important of the TQM in its core still apply to our needs in educational institutions: a never ending pursuit of perfection.As just one entity of the whole system of the human world, the educational institutions have to survive in a very tough competition. Not for the sake of competition only, but on behalf of its students, teachers, social environment etc., in short for the whole society. Principles and applications of the TQM are thus very important. The educational institutions will be aware of their environment and accordingly will be successfully interact with it. They always will be sensitive to the needs of their students and so their environment. Therefore, they will not waste resources of the country for nothing. In order to achieve their purpose, institutions will encourage students to ask questions, to find new ways to solve problems, team works, extensive interaction between students and teachers.TQM has been well known for industries in Turkey for some time and has been introduced to educational system recently. Although its benefits are accepted by the authorities in national educational board, we have tried to explore how and in what extent it is implemented in schools, especially in high schools. Since the high schools are preparing students either to industries or to universities, we believe that their applications of TQM are very important to shape the future of the country. In order to find out the perceptions of the teachers about TQM who are working in high schools, we have conduct a research based on a survey questionnaire. So, in 2007-2008 educational years, the questionnaire delivered to 112 high school teachers in Ümraniye, İstanbul. After questionnaires collected and checked some statistical analyses such as frequency distributions, t-test, one way ANOVA, chi-square to name here. Consequently, we found out that even teachers have a notion about what the TQM is, they are not well informed about it in details, and more importantly do not know how to apply it in schools.